VENUS CALLING

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21520, 17 June 1933, Page 12 (Supplement)

VENUS CALLING

By FRANK H. BODLE

CHAPTER 1 CLYSiES SETS FORTH "And that's that!" Ulysses Anderson muttered, as lie walked from the; otsce of the Wairiki Argus for the last time. His head wasn't bloody but unbowed. He walked erect, but he whistled, as, hands deep in pockets, he strolled cheerfully down the main street. He might just have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, instead of the freedom of all outdoors for a permanency. Some of the girls he passed smiled at him. Girls had the habit of smiling when they looked on the fair, curly mop and the sea-blue eyes of Ulysses Anderson. Usually lie smiled back. This morning he didn't. He was too occupied with his recent presentation and its implications. So much indeed that lie saw-neither girls nor men. His thoughts were very far awav —three thousand years at least. Not for nothing had he been nicknamed Ulysses, the Wanderer, so long ago, it seemed, that he could hardly remember the name that had come at his christening. Mechanically, unseeingly, ho dodged the traffic •on the footpath. Outside Blocker's store, where the morning traffic was briskest, fortune deserted him. Ho cannoned into a thick-set anxious-eyed young man of about his own age—and the wandering thoughts jumped thirty centuries.

" Sorry!" lie began. " My —. Why—hallo, Tiippy!" " \Miere are you going?" the thickBet one demanded, soberly. " Heard you were to be fired to-day I'm mighty sorrv, Andy, old man. About that six pounds you lent me last week " " That's enough from you, Tup with no cares-in the world. "Forget it. You and the little wife have been having a bad spin lately. But not me." He thrust out his chest and smiled at all he could see of the wide, wide world. " But not yours affectionately, Tuppy. Me —I'm Ulysses Anderson, setting out on his wanderings. Bound for Circe's Island, Kalypso kraal, the Cyclops country, and intermediate stations on the grand tour. Remember all that college stuff, Tuppy?"

, " 1 get you," Tuppy agreed, briefly, but with no lightening of gloom. " Only difference is I haven't got any Penelope keeping the home fires burning for me." Anderson's grin was cheerful. " And there's one other thing too —there's no old man Homer going to sing my travelogue. My portable and a ream or so o' clean papryus travels in the rucksack. And since, as you'll admit news has a trick of breaking my way, Borne glad day you're going to read Ulysses' wanderings hot from his own fingertips. G'bye. My love to the little woman—and keep on smiling, sonny." " Here, wait a bit," Lewis called, unhappily. " Where you going?" " Can't." Anderson turned, still grinning. •*' I'm in a hurry, Tuppy. The tide's on the turn, and I must launch mv st~ift. boat. I told you where I was going, but as you didn't seem to hear, I'll say it again. I'm starting on the Charybdis. Going to hear the Songs of Charybdis. Going to her the Songs of the Sirens —and that's something that doesn't come out of Hollywood, sonny. On your way—and goo'-bye." His long strides took him swiftly away, though his cheerful whistling lingered long in the watcher's ears. "Nutty!" Tup Lewis muttered, regretfully. " Being fired in the sacred name of economy seeins to have touched him." His eyes softened as he went oil. " He's a good chap, too. With Polly so poorly, it 'ud have been darned hard.if he'd talked about that loan." Meanwhile the good chap was still entirely cheerful. He looked at his watch and put on speed- He'd have to hurry to make that noon train. Followed a hasty packing—rather a hurried heaping into his loose kit-bag, a brief financial transaction with a regretful landlady, and a scramble for the station. Before he left, what for three years he had called home, Anderson counted his worldly wealth. " Nine pounds eleven 'n six," he tallied. " With my well-known luck — more than enough." At the station he was three minutes ahead of schedule—and twenty ahead 6f the train. He strolled to the ticket ■window. " Whore to?" the clerk demanded, aci/lly. He hadn't slept well tho night before, and his early eggs and coffee Btill tasted like dust and ashes. "I'm easy," Ulysses declared, largely. " Give mo, let's see, fifteen bob's worth o' transportation." " Don't you know where you want to go?" the clerk asked sharply. He was new to Wairiki, didn't know the ex-journalist, didn't like tho place, and these country humourists made him more sick even than their coliee. "Anywhere does mo to kick off from," Anderson spoke easily. " All you've got to worry about is to give me a pasteboard worth fifteen bob. Can't you figure that out?" " One way that's " —the clerk consulted a sheet —" Troy Creek. Forsaken hole it is too. But if you—" "/I surely do." Ulysses slapped his knee delightfully. " Pardon my break, •won't you. I had you all wrong. You're one big classical scholar. Troy Creek's tho neatest, nattiest, jumping-off place for little old Ulysses. And 1 thought you' a low-brow who didn't know his Homer. You can have a certificate from mo any time as a slap-up pilot of the Levant. Wish I could take you along." " Not for me," tho clerk said, sourly and added as his customer turned away, certainly not with a batty chap like that." Troy Creek, when seen near sundown, or at any time for that matter, 3id not present a Homeric appearance. In fact it offered small excuse for any appearance at all. There was tho public hall, which was also church, in rotation, for four separate denominations, a petrol station, a store and a dozen ■wooden houses. The hills behind hemmed the place in, seemed to brood over it. There were no horses in tho main street. If there had ever been a wooden one it had probably been chopoed up for firewood. " The Greeks have gone!" quoth Ulysses, as he strode the empty street. " They sacked it good and plenty—and that's not perhaps. I'll be on my way too." *' He walked into the store, bought Bome food and a couple of straps, harnessed the kit-bag to his shoulders and 60t out for the hill-road, back of the township. At the petrol-station a battered car of an almost forgotten vintage was refuelling. Its driver, a very long, very thin individual, stumbled to his seat • and pressed the starter as Ulysses walked '.up. The wanderer caught a »fleeting glimpse of an earnest face, tensely concentrated, though halfhidden behind very large thick lenses,

Author of *'Te Kooti's Trail**

AN ODYSSEY OF SPACE

( COPYRIGHT)

peering anxiously ahead. He saw tbo long, tapering fingers pluck nervously, unfamiliarly at levers, then with a grind of gears the relic was away. "If that man's a native, he's certainly 110 Paris," Anderson muttered. Ho turned to the man at the pump. " Queer-looking bird," Ulysses offered. " 'S he live hereabout?" " No. Stranger." The other snorted. " D'jever see anvthink like the architecture o' that —that cehariot?" " Chariot's right," Ulysses chortled. " And it reminds me. I know him. He's a wiso one. Name of Nestor. Comes from —where the heck is it? — Mycenae, that's the burg." " Never heard of it," the man said, shortly. He remembered he had a wife who believed that dinner should be eaten on schedule time. " Well, g'bye. Look here," he added, as an afterthought, " if you knew him why di'nt you ask him for a ride?" " Because," the traveller declared, lightly, " I'm looking for Circe —not the cold wisdom of that Nestorian dome." " Why, I don't —" " Don't you." Ulysses swung into his stride again. " But can't you see a wiso boy like that never would find Circe? And if he did lio'd just as likely scoot right by her." For the third time that day the traveller's sanity was called in question. " Nutty as a squirrel's crop," the garage man muttered, as he trudged toward the scent of frying pork. Ulysses didn't care. He had no trouble but for an early hint that hillclimbing with a shoulder load was going to test leg muscles before long. And even that fleeting thought soon passed. Two miles or so along, just below a sharp pinch in the hill road, he came upon the chariot resting with quiet determination by the roadside. The long man of the powerful lenses was head first in the bonnet, muttering exotic oaths and tapping hopelessly at everything in sight. He looked up with relief as the sound of unhurried footfalls came to him. "Do you—l mean, can you?" he stuttered, savaging a smudge of grease and oil below his glasses and thereby smearing one whole side of his face. " I can," Anderson asserted, blithely. " Now that Troy is taken I'm free to do anything on aarth. And you bank on me for doing it brother. Name's Ulysses, and any old-timer will tell you I'm a sack of strategems." The tall man eyed the newcomer curiously. There was still sufficient light to read the frank boyish face, to note the clean athletic figure and the smiling deep-blue eyes. Slowly a smile crept from the corner of "Nestor's" mouth. " Welcome, far wanderer," he chanted. The eyes behind the thick leases twinkled. " I'm no Helenhunter —but I catch your drift. Science is my trade. Name, Alvin Lister, from Detroit, U.S.A., and—this blazing junkheap won't budge. Know anything of —?" "Chariots," Anderson finished. "Methinks I do. Stand aside, Aristotle." Ho bent over the stubborn engine; felt here; tightened there; unloosed a nut and searched. " Petrol lino blocked," he stated, finally. " Clear now. She'll buzz. On your way, stranger. The steeds strain at the chariot yoke." " Much obliged." Lister smiled again. He had watched the amateur mechanic's competent work closely. " Hop in. 1 imagine we're going the same way. You're bound for —?" " Scvlla, Circe and the Land of the Lotos-eaters," Ulysses affirmed cheerfully. " And 1 for Venus, Mars and the Rings of Saturn," the disciple of science declared, happily. "We're well met, wanderer, you and I. Our paths lie side by side." " And that's a fact," Ulysses agreed, as ho climbed in. But to himself he added an accusation that thrice before that day had been hurled at his own head. " This bird's as batty as a bullfrog," was the word that came almost to the very tip of Ulysses' tongue. The chariot grunted, jumped, then complaining like a soul in torment, bore the pair uphill. CHAPTER 11. cibce's island Dacia Hatrick jumped out of her rough bunk, raised her hands, thumbs locked, high above her head, then ligntly, wiuiout effort, bent tnrice to touch her toes. Dacia was twenty-two and an odd month or so, which is still young enough to realise that pink silk pjjamas are the ideal costumo for a sunny morning in the wilds. She strolled briskly to the door of their hut, Hung it wide open, and stood staring at the dancing waters of the lake below. Framed in the doorway, feet bare, coils of bronze hair flowing loosely about her shoulders, grey eyes sparkling like sunshine on the waters at which she looked, Dacia Hatrick would have compelled the admiration of anv man —had thero been one in sight. There were none, or Dacia wouldn t have been where, and as, she was. Not, of course, that she had any deep-seated objection to man or boy scanning her night garments, _ even when she stood inside them. Not at oil. She knew quite well they did her ample justice. At the moment she merely objected to men in general. As you've probably guessed t Dacia was the sole heiress of that eecentric, but lamented figure, J. J. Hatrick. With his considerable fortune as a lodestone, the hunting had become so tiresomely exacting that Dacia had sought sanctuary where no man over came. She was recuperating from a strenuous season of society and suitors in a sylvan security where no pants ever defiled the landscape. At least that is how she felt and what she thought. " Wake up, Esther," Dacia _ called over her shoulder. " We're going in swimming." Gurgles and groans from the interior of the hut trailed closely by a very slow, very loud yawn. Dacia waited patiently for the full peroration of a night's sound slumber. Then —" Shako a leg, darling," she called back into tlio gloom. A shuddering pause, then—" What did you say we're doing, Dacia?" in sleepy, yet mildly horrified accents. " Swim!" " I'm not." Esther stumbled into tlie doorway. She was short and pleasantly plump; maybe twenty-seven — though it's quite difficult to be accurate with the pleasantly plump. In her own placid way she was just as easy to look on as Dacia, though at the moment there was a glint of determination in her dark eyes. They snapped, then as they rested on the large expanse. of distinctly wet water, slie shuddered slightly. " For one thing, she ended, w.ith a show of firmness, " I didn't bring a bathing suit." " Neither did I," Dacia said, evenly , " but we'll swim, just the same. Like the Greeks did—in our original bathing suits. T've always wanted to do just, that, but everywhere lias always been so. crowded." (To be continued daily)